Time to do my traditional sum-up of the year in pictures! As usual, I’m posting my favourite from each month and because not all months are created equal, these may not necessarily be my 12 best pictures of the year. 2011 was a bit of a revolutionary year for me. There were two major things that happened, the biggest surprise was that I discovered wideangle photography which resulted in me buying no less than two wideangle lenses, when to my utter surprise I found out that my first wideangle wasn’t wide enough. Who would’ve thought? The second thing that happened was that I found myself liking black&white photography. I’ve always said that colour is important to me as a nature photographer, because what is nature without colour? It turned out that it’s form and pattern and it’s quite nice, when used right.

* * *

January

Winter 2010-11 was unusually cold. When the cold weather arrived in November, it never let go until February and when it was cold, it was really cold. And without any warmer periods, the snow just kept piling up. This picture is from one of my many skiing trips, during a day with overcast skies and a little bit of snowfall. That kind of weather turns the world into monochrome, which gives you good opportunities to strip the pictures to the bare necessities. I’ve reprocessed the picture since first publishing it, deliberately overexposed and then converted to b&w (there was only very little colour in the branches to start with).

* * *

February

February full moon was an amazing event. The landscape was looking at its winter’s best and the night was clear (and cold). It was almost surreal to be walking around in the moonlight but unfortunately I don’t have any great landscape options within a convenient walking distance from home and I didn’t feel like going for a long hike at night. Next time this happens, I will have to do that hike because it will sure be worth it!

* * *

March

I was starting to think that I wouldn’t photograph the squirrel this year, but the squirrel had other ideas. I noticed how it would run up the tree when it got nervous, and then climb back down a moment later. I tried to be ready for it but it’s not easy because those things move really fast… so needless to say how amazed I was to see that I had actually nailed the sharpness on this one and didn’t clip off any body parts. The composition wasn’t ideal though with the space being really tight on the left and at the bottom, so I needed to invest a few hours of work to increase the space and in the end I think it was well worth the effort. This pose definitely stands out from my other squirrel pictures.

* * *

April

After all that cold weather and snow, I thought that spring would be late this year but it came with a bang instead and we had summer temperatures at easter. The crocuses, as always, launched the flower photography season and even if my crocuses are not very numerous or big, I found this one individual which gave me a great macro opportunity. I love a frame filler!

* * *

May

It shouldn’t be possible but May was actually a cooler month than April. Or rather, the warmest day in April was warmer than any day in May, but the medium temperatures were obviously creeping up and the nature blossomed out. Traditionally my May favourite should be a flower… but this year it was a tiger! We visited the Orsa Björnpark zoo, mainly because we wanted to see the snow leopard which is a new addition in the zoo. It was close to the closing time before the snow leopard showed itself and I got one fairly bad picture out of it, but it seems like the tigers always put up a good show. And they are magnificent animals! If the picture looks dark, it’s deliberate. A trained eye will see the pattern from the chain link fence but by selectively underexposing, I can hide it a little bit and bring focus on the face instead.

* * *

June

Surprisingly, no orchids in the list this year. It starts to feel like I’ve done all I can with them, so I have to think of some new ideas. In the meanwhile, other flowers will do – like the twinflower, which were growing so numerous that they formed a white carpet on the forest floor in some places. I have a big patch of them growing right behind my garage so sometimes you don’t have to go far to get great pictures. Speaking of which, the crocus from April was shot under my kitchen window, and the March squirrel from my living room…

* * *

July

July was a great month. It normally always is, with great opportunities for both flowers and landscape. If I did a top 10 list of the year instead of by month, I could probably fill half of the list with pictures from July. But my favourite is this sunset picture with layers, it was the last picture on an evening that was one of the best photography sessions I’ve ever had. Warm, sunny and calm – the stuff memories are made of.

* * *

August

If July was a great month, then August was bad. As usual. We had a great full moon opportunity and while I had this incredible fortune of having the sun come out just at the right moment to light up the foreground, I screwed up the picture by missing the DOF. So what looks great at first look, doesn’t really pass a closer inspection. And the pictures which have the DOF are lacking the light or the composition. So it was a tough choice. But this time I let the visual aspect come before the technical aspect, so my photo of the month is the DOF impaired full moon composition.

* * *

September

I had really counted on September to give me great pictures. I mean, with the mountains and autumn colours, how could you fail? Well, take out the autumn colours and suddenly you’re looking at a landscape which is twice as dull, instead of twice as great. A fungal disease started killing the birch leaves already in August, leaving nothing for September. I did the best I could, under the circumstances, and once you accept that you can’t change the situation, then it’s just a matter of making the most of it and I ended up having a great vacation anyway. But the conditions did affect my choice of the favourite picture so instead of a grand landscape with glorious autumn colours, I chose a black&white intimate scene. This is a turning point – if you had told me last year that one of my favourite pictures would be a monochrome taken with a wideangle lens, I would’ve laughed at you!

* * *

October

For a long time, a crested tit held the favourite spot for October. But the more I look at this squirrel picture which is obviously a total fluke, the more I like it. Nothing is sharp in the frame, not even the perch in the lower right corner (shaken by the jumping squirrel). But I mean… what are the odds of getting this? A perfect diagonal direction, the tail, the ”just right” motion blur… I’m sure that people will think that this is a joke, and that’s fine by me. I think it’s a good joke!

* * *

November

November, my nemesis. On average, the worst month of the year by a wide margin. It wasn’t a particularly productive month this year either, but I got a few surprisingly good frames. And now you see what I meant about me and monochrome – I’m actually starting to get the hang of it! I knew I had a keeper the moment I saw this root, and I also knew it would do great in B&W.

* * *

December

In 2010, winter came early. In 2011, winter was late. But then finally in early December, we got a lot of snow and things started looking up, giving me a few days of good photography. But these good days were followed by warm days with a touch of rain and finally culminated in a big storm on Boxing Day that wreaked havoc and left a destroyed landscape behind it. Today, on the last day of the year, it is a sorry sight that I can see from my window. The forecast says that it will snow tomorrow, so I hope that I can get the year 2012 photography off to a running start!